Should Zenimax start selling ESO gold?

david271749

What do you think Zenimax should do to combat gold farmers and exploiters?

Carnagan

No

What? No! Doing that would just encourage more gold farming, since they'd just undercut Zenimax. Meanwhile, it would drive up the price of things in the game's economy as legally purchased gold came onto the market.

You'd create a situation where people have to buy gold, which would drive more people to buying from gold farmers.

carlos.trevisan.contatonrb19_ESO

Yes

In my opinion even if bots sell gold cheaper then ESO store, most people that buy gold still will prefer buy from the store for the safety of it.
another way to "sell gold", but not directly, its by selling Game items on Store (like motifs, dyes, armor appearences,...) using real money and permit players to sell them on game. This way players that doesnt want (or cant) spent real money in a game still be able to buy items, using the game gold that had grind. SWTOR does this, even being far from perfect, i think its far better then the way ESO its right now, at least

WebBull

No

No way. This is not F2P, at least not yet.

Fuzzylumpkins

No

WTF are you serious? Games that sell gold don't charge you 75 bucks to walk in the door followed by 15 bucks a month to stick around.

pavelcherepanskyrwb17_ESO

No

You mad, dawg? No-no-no!

david271749

Yes

Everyone who has answered no, hasn't offered an alternate solution.

The question under the title:
"What do you think Zenimax should do to combat gold farmers and exploiters?"

andreas.rudroffb16_ESO

No

imagine that:

Rich Gamer buys gold for 100000 Dollars and floods the market (completle without the fear of be banned)
your items will go up in Gold by 10000%

happy farming gold withour Money then

Pay to Win:
Rich gamers buy gold and offer Gold for loot/iniruns
e.g. : "offering 1000K Gold for complete trial run"
or . "offering 10000K Gold for best time in Trials"

Ezrith

No

Nope, not fixing the gold sellers and bot plague in games that are offering that feature. The sellers just undercut everyone still.

Spoon-fed players that want everything NOW because they have less playtime and money to spare, or are too lazy or impatient, just need to stop buying from the sellers so those naturally go away. There is nothing wrong with a game taking more time to reach high end. Guess what, you'll enjoy it for a longer time!

Hiply

No

david271749 wrote: »

Everyone who has answered no, hasn't offered an alternate solution.

The question under the title:
"What do you think Zenimax should do to combat gold farmers and exploiters?"

Ban them all, was that so hard? Account sends goldspam? Account is perma-banned. Account broadcasts zone or local goldspam? Account is perma-banned. Bot-train? Account is perma-banned...and so on.

Buyers are a tougher nut to crack, obviously. And the longer the game goes on the less obvious large transactions are. But where there is irrefutable evidence (whatever may constitute that, ianal) ban them at the account level too.

Look, whales are no damn good for any MMO economy unless you are one of said whales. They cause massive inflation, driving up the prices of the most desirable items and in fact assisting gold sellers in making profits.

Loco_Mofo

No

Ridiculous suggestion.

There is nothing to buy in this game except bag/bank space and over priced motifs...

Ish_Fingers

No

No - Gold selling/Real Money Trade isn't an ESO exclusive problem and as far as I can see, will always be a problem for MMORPGs. I would hate to see ESO devolve into a 'Pay to Win' title.

Continuously banning gold farmers/sellers/bots whilst maintaining clear communication with the community would be the best way to address the problem. Perhaps highlight what efforts have been taken, how many accounts were found guilty of such actions and most importantly, make it clear to the player base that purchasing gold is against the ToS.

The reason I clarify that last point is unfortunately, some players - particularly players new to online gaming - are unaware of the practice and perhaps think it is a legitimate method of obtaining gold. A simple server-wide message would suffice (akin to announcements etc.)

Edit: In FFXI, a 'Special Task Force' was created in response to overwhelming RMT actions. Their sole duty was to limit any such activity and the results were felt almost instantly. Granted it was a good 6+ years after launch that this began if my memory serves me well (which it doesn't most of the time) but similar, dedicated staff members in ESO would go a long way. Even if it's just to temporarily suspend accounts 'until further clarification' or some such.

Darastix

Yes

i think they should, but they should do it with fake sites so they can ban the buyes

andreas.rudroffb16_ESO

No

david271749 wrote: »

Everyone who has answered no, hasn't offered an alternate solution.

The question under the title:
"What do you think Zenimax should do to combat gold farmers and exploiters?"

do the f+++ing job they get payed for....
e.g. hire 2-4 gamemasters (ingame) for each megaserver that are online and react in minutes (about 2000-3000 Bucks per gm per month) = 8000-24000 Bucks
give them a tool that lets them realtime pars the charlogs (last 12 hours would be enough)

then make a easy acessable report function (e.g. a UI button with a popup of 3-5 report check options)

to ensure a failsafe: make each bans last 12-24 hours until they get reviewed by a full pars, then they get permabans

if i assume 200000 people playing eso thats 450000-500000 bucks / mo from subs
so even 24000 bucks are just under 5%

david271749

Yes

andreas.rudroffb16_ESO wrote: »

david271749 wrote: »

Everyone who has answered no, hasn't offered an alternate solution.

The question under the title:
"What do you think Zenimax should do to combat gold farmers and exploiters?"

do the f+++ing job they get payed for....

I wish.

true2moon_ESO

Yes

I look at it like this, if the game company dont sell gold, then we get gold spammers. And the gold spammers are obnoxious tards that just ruin games. Personally I dont see any advantage in buy gold, its not going to make you any better in pvp, and it just jacks up the prices for the other players who can get the stuff easy from playing anyhow. So to me, I think both sides win when the company sells the gold.

you will never beat the gold sellers any other way, then by just having the company sell it. if gold sellers were not such ***, then I wouldnt mind them, but the fact they just spam and spam and spam over and over, just makes me fuckign sick. I dont play a game to get that ***, I get enough of that garbage from noobs trying to sell *** in the pvp zone.

So yes, the company can sell all the gold they want, make more money and hopefully kill the gold spammers and give us a cheaper sub in the mean time. Win = Win.

you can never bot and undercut the company prices in selling, the company selling would destroy the bot/farm market in no time. Who wants to buy from these *** who spam, and steal people's accounts any how? I think most people would even pay more for the security of buying it from the company.

Blackwidow

No

Anyone who votes yes does want to earn a thing in the game for themselves.

JosephChip

No

Damn, I voted no but I am totally in favour of chocolate money. If they added an in-game store for chocolate money I would be all over that ***.

Arsenic_Touch

Amusing that people think zenimax selling gold would accomplish anything. Well scratch that, it would accomplish one thing. It would ruin the game. If you think that your idea would have any reflection on gold sales, farmers and botters, I have a bridge for sale.

Ish_Fingers

No

true2moon_ESO wrote: »

[Snip]

If it's the advertisements you don't like; how would you like a great banner across this website advertising 'Sick of waiting for your next Super-Sword? Buy it now on the online store!' Or 'Waiting to upgrade? Wait no longer, buy materials now!' It would open a whole can of worms...

Don't think that advertisements will go away; they'll still be here and even more in-your-face than before.

If gold was available to buy officially, what's to stop it being advertised in-game? An annoying icon appears on every trader, guild store, bank menu etc... And when that's the case, what recourse do we have? We can't complain, especially if it's a U-turn decision (IE they go from their current policy to allowing official gold buying).

If the /zone spam annoys you so, have you tried changing the filters to better suit your needs? Personally,/zone rarely bothers me and if gold-sellers do crop up, the ignore function works well enough 90% of the time.

esoone

Yes

andreas.rudroffb16_ESO wrote: »

imagine that:

Rich Gamer buys gold for 100000 Dollars and floods the market (completle without the fear of be banned)
your items will go up in Gold by 10000%

happy farming gold withour Money then

Pay to Win:
Rich gamers buy gold and offer Gold for loot/iniruns
e.g. : "offering 1000K Gold for complete trial run"
or . "offering 10000K Gold for best time in Trials"

Your right 100% but right now anything is better then the flood of bots. These seem to increase daily so folk buy themselves silly on gold already.

Fuzzylumpkins

No

david271749 wrote: »

Everyone who has answered no, hasn't offered an alternate solution.

The question under the title:
"What do you think Zenimax should do to combat gold farmers and exploiters?"

Write more advanced codes that cant be rewritten by 5 year olds. not leave the information wide open like a dog door for everyone to sneak in and out of at will.

rfpalmerb16_ESO

Yes

People are under the mistaken belief that ITEMS ARE POWER in this game. They are not. This is not WOW where you can't compete if you don't have "King Boogermongs Uber Light Sword of Death". The "NO!"s aren't admitting that the gold sinks in the game are, NOT for items and materials but are for horses, respecs, storage space, equipment repairs and siege equipment.

As for driving up prices, is the person who owns all the motifs going to keep buying more, driving up prices even though they have all of them? How about the person that already has a vamp bite, are they somehow going to hord vamp-bites to drive up the price? Considering how easy (and much easier it would be without bots) it is to find crafting materials, their price isn't a volatile as you would believe.

How is someone with a slightly faster horse, or more backpack or bank space going to hurt the game? How is someone who has respec'd their toon 50 times going to hurt the game?

If the world worked thrived on the could-be and might-happen fear that is oozing to the surface here, we would have never left the cave.

TicToc

No

No, it is a stupid idea, for so many reasons. One major reason is that you put supply and demand in the hand of the same party. They could keep making things very costly to get people spending more money to buy their gold. It is just a bad idea.

The bots need to dealt with directly. This idea is just as bad as nerfing certain character skills just because bots are using them.

rfpalmerb16_ESO

Yes

TicToc wrote: »

No, it is a stupid idea, for so many reasons. One major reason is that you put supply and demand in the hand of the same party. They could keep making things very costly to get people spending more money to buy their gold. It is just a bad idea.

Make what "things very costly to get" exactly? A vamp bite? A motif? A denata rune? 100 ebony ore? OMG the game is going to break unless someone goes to the vamp spawn site, or looks in a few chests, or harvests some runes or ore. Wait... are you suggesting that more gold would make respecs more expensive and that I would have to pay more to feed my horses?

harnessedyeti9

Yes

This is seriously the funniest thing I've read in these forums yet.

Wolfahm

No

[Moderator Note: Removed per our rules on Flaming]

mousekime111rwb17_ESO

No

you're high to even suggest this pay to play not pay to win

the.dzeneralb16_ESO

No

No, because its a stupid method of fixing things when there are other methods to fix it.

Your argument that ZoS should sell gold is basically this: We want person A to stop selling gold for real cash, so we'll get person B to sell gold for real cash!

Or the other argument: Things are costing too much gold in this game, lets make them cost REAL money instead

The third argument: So what if you have more materials to make better armor, and run faster with a better mount, it's not like that really would make the game any different. (Protip: It would ruin tihngs like PvP and crafting and would make prices higher for most things)

All of these are stupid, they wouldn't be stupid if it was F2P (please dont make this game f2p).

vyndral13preub18_ESO

No

This argument is going strange places, so the idea is buying legal gold will slow down the bots. But it won't break the game since there is nothing worth buying. Or won't be shortly because everyone will have all the motifs!

So in a month the bot problem will solve itself since no one will have anything left to buy?

rfpalmerb16_ESO

Yes

Carnagan wrote: »

What? No! Doing that would just encourage more gold farming, since they'd just undercut Zenimax. Meanwhile, it would drive up the price of things in the game's economy as legally purchased gold came onto the market.

You'd create a situation where people have to buy gold, which would drive more people to buying from gold farmers.

Your logic is not sound. Botters have a base cost, i.e. a cost of producing gold that if they go below they no longer make money and begin to loose real world money. They can not undercut ZOS since ZOS has a base cost of ... zero. ZOS could sell gold for $0.000001/gold and that $0.000001 would be profit, the botter must not sell it for less than:

The amount of gold they farm in a month
______________________________________________________________________
( The number of accounts they own x $15 + fixed costs )

vyndral13preub18_ESO wrote: »

This argument is going strange places, so the idea is buying legal gold will slow down the bots. But it won't break the game since there is nothing worth buying. Or won't be shortly because everyone will have all the motifs!

So in a month the bot problem will solve itself since no one will have anything left to buy?

I believe it has been said the the biggest sinks are respecs, inventory, repairs and horses. But yes, the nice thing about supply and demand is that a lack of demand (because everyone who wants one has one) affects the cost and available of the supply.